Than The Devil You Don't
by Shamrock
Summary: The first seventy-two hours of Shaw's confinement in the subway station involve talking and weapons. She's fine with the weapons.


Finch is there when she finally comes around, hovering attentively yet warily by the end of the cot as she struggles through the dry mouth and nausea to swing her legs off the side and get her breathing under control. Bear whines from his spot on the floor, lifting his head to watch her slow progress.

"John?" is the first thing she manages to croak out, her drug-fuelled half-dreams of him going down in a hail of bullets from a mob shootout still all too clear in her otherwise addled mind.

"Mr. Reese is unscathed; he, Elias and Dominic all made it out unharmed. Mr. Marconi was not so lucky."

"Who?" Shaw cannot place the name, straining to remember the details of the day.

"Scarface." Harold's mouth turns down as though the nickname leaves an unpleasant taste on his lips but Shaw is only half-listening, having already moved past concern for anyone who isn't John and gone straight to _sorry sweetie_ and a hypodermic in her neck.

"Root?"

Finch winces at the open hostility in her tone and tentatively takes a seat beside her on the bed. "I haven't heard from her since she dropped you off here."

"I'm going to kill her." Shaw enunciates each word clearly but even to her it feels half-hearted, an empty threat.

"That would be a strange way to repay her for saving your, and perhaps indeed all of our lives." Finch is using his 'precise' voice and Shaw bites back a groan, knowing that particular intonation means an impending lecture.

"She lied to me, Harold. She left John out there on his own and-"

"John had me, and as you can see we managed to save our number entirely without your help. Indeed, the person most at risk was you, and instead of returning here as you had been urged to do, you apparently insisted upon rushing headfirst into a situation that was already dangerous enough without you involving Samaritan as well." Shaw clenches her jaw, recognising the truth behind his words even as her pride rails against them. Harold's glare pins her in place and she itches under his scrutiny.

"What was I supposed to do? You're always talking about how we're a team, but I'm meant to just leave him standing between Elias and The Brotherhood with no backup?"

"If that is the most prudent course of action? Yes, that is exactly what you're supposed to do." His tone softens as he hands Shaw a bottle of water, unscrewing the cap when her hands fumble it. "I cannot stress enough just how precarious our situation is now that Samaritan is aware of your cover identity."

"I get it, Finch."

"Do you?" His question is quiet, pitched low enough that Shaw finds herself leaning towards him to hear better. Or maybe her balance is still a little off with the sedative still working its way out of her system. "Can you imagine, Ms. Shaw, how even the slightest trace of you on Samaritan's radar - a glimpse of your face in the background of a tourist's photo, three seconds of your voice picked up on a phone call - could bring something ten times worse than one operative in your workplace down on all our heads?"

Shaw thinks about it, really thinks about it. She reckons John's chances against a dozen of those blonde bitches hell bent on a shootout, weighs Harold's survival skills against Greer's resources, recalls Fusco's voice on the other end of a phone line while she was looking at his traumatised son - tries her damndest not to think about Root at all.

She glances up at the perspex board where Harold still has Elias' photo, next to that of his now deceased lieutenant. It's easy to blame the drugs when her mind superimposes other images over them - Cole's blood on her hands, Carter's broken body, the explosion that ripped through Hersh. She doesn't feel the grief of those losses, but anger? Anger she can do. They've lost enough already.

"I get it, Finch."

He nods once and stands, clipping Bear's leash to the dog's collar and making for the exit. He limps a few paces away before turning back. "There is a long war still ahead of us, Ms. Shaw. It will take all of our combined skills and resources to win it."

She doesn't answer, just nods her understanding of the unspoken message.

_'You're not out of the game yet.'_

And somewhere underneath that,

_'Trust us.'_

* * *

><p>She pulls the barrel free of her .45, placing it in line with the slide in front of her while on the other side of the table John sprays solvent over his disassembled rifle. They've been working in companionable silence for nearly an hour now and the familiar routine along with the smell of oil and metal has Shaw feeling the most comfortable she has in the thirty-six hours she's been confined to the subway.<p>

"What did you have?" his voice is abruptly loud in the tiled room, and he clarifies a little more quietly, "At the store? Root said you gave Samaritan's agent a hell of a firefight."

She shrugs, slipping a brush down the barrel in short, sharp strokes. "P90 under the counter. Plus what I had on me."

"Now that's good accessorising. What shade of lipstick goes with a submachine gun anyway?"

Shaw rolls her eyes. "I was kind of hoping my dumbass manager would mistake it for a price gun, give us all a little pre-sale entertainment."

Reese grins but she notices it doesn't reach his eyes. "Well even if you didn't manage to maim any civilians, I'm glad you had it there."

"I got lucky." The frank admission startles them both a little, but Shaw's face is a careful blank when John glances over at her. "Spotted her before she had a chance to get a round off."

He doesn't have to be able to read the frustration coming off her, he can imagine only too well exactly how he'd feel in the same situation. "Little luck goes a long way."

"Yeah, but how long can it hold out?"

Her words ratchet up the unsettled feeling he's been carrying around ever since Samaritan came online and sent Detective Riley underground. Every war has its own tempo, its own pace, and he can feel this one starting to build to a crescendo. The truth is he has no idea how much longer their luck can hold out, and days like yesterday make him feel like they've already pushed their limits too far. Casualties are a fact of war he should be well acquainted with, but it didn't stop Carter's death from blindsiding him completely. He won't make that mistake again.

"Maybe not long." He shrugs, "Or maybe twenty years from now we all sit around Finch's Home for Retired Former Assassins talking about how we took down an all-seeing evil AI."

Shaw snorts at both the absurdity of the idea and at her own foolishness for wishing so badly it could happen.

"But if it's the former," he continues, "There's a couple of things I want to say."

She squirms, actually squirms in her seat, and she's in danger of scrubbing the finish on her firearm right the hell off but she doesn't interrupt him.

"It's been an honour serving with you, Sameen." She looks up, right into his warm, open gaze and thinks of all the times on the battlefield she'd have given her right arm for a guy like John on her team. "I mean," he smirks, "if I had to get saddled with a jarhead."

Okay, so just her right hand. Or a finger. A pinkie maybe.

"You need more oil there, snake-eater," she grunts as she tosses him the spray.

This time his grin reaches all the way to his eyes.

* * *

><p>Bear snapping into an alert posture with a friendly whine is her first indication that she's not alone in the subway car, the clicking of heels on tile tells her who the new arrival is. Shaw tightens her grip on the knife she's sharpening, trying to control her breathing and her suddenly racing mind. She figures it for a calculated ploy, waiting three days to show her face, giving Shaw ample time to cool down but also nurse her grudge back to full flame. She doesn't look up when the other woman's presence in the doorway blocks her light, just stares at the blade in her hand, whetstone moving with a rhythmic shink.<p>

"So on a scale of a mild scolding to you using that knife creatively, how worried should I be?"

Three, four, five strokes and she doesn't answer. Partly she wants Root to suffer the uncertainty, but she's also grappling with the fact that just the sound of her voice has made all of Shaw's anger feel a lot less righteous.

"Well I'm not super happy about you roofie-ing me _again_," she stops the motion of the whetstone but grips the knife handle tighter, still not looking up. "But I may have been acting a little... recklessly." At that she exhales loudly, remembering Harold's words. "And I guess at least you didn't taze me." Her eyes flick up to Root's. "This time."

Something loosens in the other woman's expression and she flashes a bright, wide smile. Shaw mentally slaps herself for being able to read the genuine relief under the fake grin and worse, for _caring_ about it. Root moves from where she was leaning, arms crossed in the subway carriage door, to sit on the seats perpendicular to Shaw's, just those few inches too close to be polite. It's intentional and infuriating and far too comforting. Shaw's knuckles turn white on the knife.

"I did have it with me," Root fishes in her pocket and pulls the aforementioned tazer free. "Just in case."

"Just in case... the elephant-sized dose of sedative didn't do the job?" Shaw raises an eyebrow.

"I know better than to underestimate you, Sameen."

Shaw frowns, it's the usual semi-flirtatious banter but the tone's all wrong, half-hearted at best.

"Just tell me you've got a plan, Root. Or that the Machine does. Anything that doesn't involve me sitting here waiting for Samaritan to come finish the job."

The flicker of hope Shaw has been telling herself she doesn't have dies out completely when Root just looks at her with dead eyes.

"If She has a plan, I can't see what it is." Root's hands toy with the tazer idly. "Ever since Samaritan, it's all shadows and hints and guesses, and if it is all leading to something, to some endgame She has in mind... I don't know if it's the same outcome we're fighting for."

"That's a lot of 'ifs'." Shaw's voice is gruff, her eyes narrow as she tries to process how unsettling it is to watch Root waver. "You picked a hell of a time to have a crisis of faith here."

She laughs at that, a short, brittle outburst. "Faith? You know, all of that time I was searching for Her, protecting Her, doing Her bidding, that's all I had - blind faith." She stares at the scuffed floor under her feet, eyes unseeing. "Isn't faith supposed to be rewarded?"

Shaw shrugs. She's never been a big fan of zealotry in the first place - her mother's experiences in Iran coupled with a career shooting people who believed their god was the One True God - but a disillusioned zealot asking impossible metaphysical questions about a damn computer is altogether beyond her. "We're all still alive, aren't we?"

Root's eyes snap up at that and the anger Shaw sees there makes her heart pound a little faster. She doesn't have to say it, Shaw can hear the echo of _you almost died back there/next time/people who care for you_ as clearly as if Root had shouted it in her ear.

"For now." And just as quickly the anger's gone, seeping from her in an exhausted sigh. "But I can't see what comes next, and if She can, She's not telling me." Root bites her lip, weighing her words. "I don't know what I'm supposed to do now."

Shaw watches the other woman deflate beside her and thinks about faith, about teams, about trust. She thinks about Harold and his guidance, John and his support, Root and all the things she offers that Shaw is working hard to get her head around. She thinks maybe this is what a family feels like - people you care about, leaning in towards you, hoping you don't pull away.

"Show me how to get good intel from this Cloud thing."

"What?" Root's looking at her perplexed, nose scrunched up in a way that if Shaw was someone else she might call adorable.

"The Cloud, right? Everyone's personal data floating around in cyberspace?"

Root tilts her head, the beginnings of an actual smile playing across her lips. "Are you asking me to show you how to hack?"

Shaw huffs and gestures to Harold's computer setup just outside the door. "Well if you guys are going to be running around chasing down numbers seems like the least I can do is make myself useful here playing nerd."

She's met with a look of disbelief that slowly softens into understanding. It may not be the grand purpose that Root is looking for, but it's something small that Shaw can do for her, that Shaw is _willing_ to do for her.

"Alrighty then." Root is up and halfway across the platform, already talking about algorithms and database injection which Shaw lets wash over her, focusing instead on an utterly ridiculous twinge of satisfaction that accompanies the now returned spark in the taller woman's eyes.

"First rule," Root intones as they pull a couple of chairs up to the screens, "no food at the computers." She grabs the remains of Shaw's lunch and dumps it in the bin, fastidiously brushing the crumbs off the desk for Bear to happily lick from the floor.

Shaw shakes her head. "You and Harold are made for each other, you know that?"

Root's smile turns thoroughly wicked as she grabs the keyboard. "He's really not my type," she purrs.

Shaw holds back the reflexive putdown but allows herself the luxury of an eye roll. Root just smirks at her and reaches for the mouse, leaning into the other woman's personal space.

Shaw settles into her chair and grins back. She doesn't pull away.


End file.
